Overview

The text of Eliot's 1922 masterpiece is accompanied by thorough explanatory annotations as well as by Eliot's own knotty notes, some of which require annotation themselves. For ease of reading, this Norton Critical Edition presents The Waste Landas it first appeared in the American edition (Boni & Liveright), with Eliot's notes at the end. Contexts provides readers with invaluable materials on The Waste Land's sources, composition, and publication history. Criticism traces the poem's reception with ...

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Overview

The text of Eliot's 1922 masterpiece is accompanied by thorough explanatory annotations as well as by Eliot's own knotty notes, some of which require annotation themselves. For ease of reading, this Norton Critical Edition presents The Waste Landas it first appeared in the American edition (Boni & Liveright), with Eliot's notes at the end. Contexts provides readers with invaluable materials on The Waste Land's sources, composition, and publication history. Criticism traces the poem's reception with twenty-five reviews and essays, from first reactions through the end of the twentieth century. Included are reviews published in the Times Literary Supplement, along with selections by Virginia Woolf, Gilbert Seldes, Edmund Wilson, Elinor Wylie, Conrad Aiken, Charles Powell, Gorham Munson, Malcolm Cowley, Ralph Ellison, John Crowe Ransom, I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, Cleanth Brooks, Delmore Schwartz, Denis Donoghue, Robert Langbaum, Marianne Thormählen, A. D. Moody, Ronald Bush, Maud Ellman, Christine Froula, and Tim Armstrong. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are included.

About the Series: No other series of classic texts equals the caliber of the Norton Critical Editions. Each volume combines the most authoritative text available with the comprehenive pedagogical apparatus necessary to appreciate the work fully. Careful editing, first-rate translation, and thorough explanatory annotations allow each text to meet the highest literary standards while remaining accessible to students. Each edition is printed on acid-free paper and every text in the series remains in print. Norton Critical Editions are the choice for excellence in scholarship for students at more than 2,000 universities worldwide.

Author Biography: Michael North is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature, The Final Sculpture: Public Monuments and Modern Poets, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, and Henry Green and the Writing of His Generation, as well as many articles on various aspects of twentieth-century literature.

What People Are Saying

Anthony Burgess

The Waste Land remains the best manifesto of modernism in poetry — a triumph of concision, eloquence, colloquialism, symbolism, cinematic cutting, collage of existing literature as well as popular song, all in the service of a kind of purgatorial philosophy, civilization was decaying, man was growing impotent, salvation lay in the injunctions of a Sanskrit Upanishad: "Give, sympathize, control." (Anthony Burgess, from One Man's Chorus)

Editorial Reviews

Library Journal

Written when Eliot was working as a bank clerk and heavily edited by his friend Ezra Pound, 1922's The Waste Land could probably take the prize as the most important English-language poem of the 20th century. This 75th-anniversary edition includes the full text plus notes and an afterword by scholar/editor Christopher Ricks.

Booknews

Prints the first American edition (Boni & Liveright) of Eliot's most important work, accompanied by the editor's detailed annotations. Eliot's own notoriously inscrutable notes, placed at the end, are also annotated. The abundant explanatory material includes background on the poem's sources, composition, and publication history as well as 25 critical reviews and essays. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Times Literary Supplement

“We know of no other modern poet who can more adequately and movingly reveal to us the inextricable tangle of the sordid and the beautiful that make up life.”

Conrad Aiken

“The Waste Land is unquestionably important, unquestionably brilliant…The poem must be taken—most invitingly offers itself—as a brilliant and kaleidoscopic confusion; as a series of sharp, discrete, slightly related perceptions and feelings, dramatically and lyrically presented, and violently juxtaposed…It shimmers, it suggests, it gives the desired strangeness…One of the most moving and original poems of our time.”

F. R. Leavis

“[An achievement] of the first importance for English poetry. In it a mind fully alive in the age compels a poetic triumph.”

Related Subjects

Meet the Author

When T. S. Eliot died, wrote Robert Giroux, "the world became a lesser place." Certainly the most imposing poet of his time, Eliot was revered by Igor Stravinsky "not only as a great sorcerer of words but as the very key keeper of the language." For Alfred Kazin he was "themana known as 'T. S. Eliot,' the model poet of our time, the most cited poet and incarnation of literary correctness in the English-speaking world." Northrop Frye simply states: "A thorough knowledge of Eliot is compulsory for anyone interested in contemporary literature. Whether he is liked or disliked is of no importance, but he must be read."

In 1945 Eliot wrote: "A poet must take as his material his own language as it is actually spoken around him." Correlatively, the duty of the poet, as Eliot emphasized in a 1943 lecture, "is only indirectly to the people: his direct duty is to his language, first to preserve, and second to extend and improve." (TPF)

Table of Contents

Introduction 7
Biographical Sketch 14
The Story Behind the Story 19
List of Characters 22
Summary and Analysis 26
Critical Views 53
Eleanor Cook on Maps of The Waste Land 53
Louis Menand on Nineteenth Century Style 57
Sandra M. Gilbert on Eliot's Mourning of a Friend 68
Michael Levenson on Eliot's Views of Postwar London 74
Juan A. Suarez on the Meaning of the Gramophone 85
Shawn R. Tucker on Anxiety in The Waste Land 89
Thomas Dilworth on Sex Between the Typist and the Young Man 94
Camelia Elias and Bent Soerensen on the Influence of Ovid 97
Works by T.S. Eliot 101
Annotated Bibliography 103
Contributors 105
Acknowledgments 108
Index 110

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Customer Reviews

Luciano-E

Posted January 9, 2015

The Waste Land by T. S. Elliot is a poem that makes the reader s

The Waste Land by T. S. Elliot is a poem that makes the reader see the dark and commonly over looked reality of life and death. The poem focuses on the fragile mental state of many people during the post World War One time period. Elliot shows his view that society had become wounded and altered through the multiple accounts of painful memories, social hardships, abuse, and more told by multiple narrators. All these experiences combined created a society in which people were questioning whether or not they had the strength to keep on living, relationships were broken and many people couldn’t effectively communicate or resolve issues together. The poem gives the characters a sense of hollowness and lack of emotions, the people act more like animals than humans because of their inability to feel or cope with emotions. Elliot’s poem was created with the intention to make society aware of the overlooked issue and recognize the need for a change. The writing style of the poem confuses the reader and requires thought to interpret because he was mimicking the confusion and chaos of the real world. Elliot also shows the world to be a barren wasteland. He doesn’t talk about new life in a positive way, he only shows how society runs from the idea of it and rather hides in “forgetful snow” and get joy out of feeding off “A little life with dried tubers.” The contrast between high and low society is also a message that Elliot wanted to show in his poem. Both higher and lower class people suffered in the aftermath of the war but expressed their pains in different ways. The higher-class people showed irritable and paranoid character traits and showed a lot of caring for little issues. The lower class people showed less caring for their physical state and showed little emoticon or caring about much of anything. The depression and disintegration of society affected everyone and lead to a damaged and unproductive world.

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Anonymous

Posted July 27, 2013

Don't buy this version

The editorial review refers to a different version of this poem, with annotatios and an afterward. This version is just the poem, which you can get for free.

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Anonymous

Posted April 5, 2013

HP Who?

Whoever is selling this doesn't even know who authored it. This has nothing to do with HP Lovecraft. Don't buy from this seller.

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tafoot1

Posted December 11, 2012

A timeless classic!

This used to be required reading for all educated individuals, and it should be required again.

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